Henry David Thoreau

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain long in the mould of the other, but makes its own bed, and pushes itself away the shortest and surest way, by its own strength, and rises as a tree, and does not wait to decay and manure the ground for new acorns, if it be an oak, but grows its own way, and spreads its leaves to the sun, and draws its sustenance from the same earth, and lives.

We are wont to imagine that it would be a pleasant pastime to be a potato and grow in the dark, but it is not so.

The other day, I was in the woods, and I saw a squirrel. And I thought, 'What a busy little fellow!' And then I thought, 'What am I doing with my life?'

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

It is not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a calm mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any. May be they are simply great enough to receive without misgiving.

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: 'Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.'

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.